Thank you everyone for the votes. I wanted to give a little bit more background into my story. About 10 years ago I was thinking about how much I had forgotten about what I had learned in school. I thought, what if if my life depended on remembering those things? Or, what if I was in a situation where any of the things I couldn't remember anymore were lost forever?
The problem was I couldn't think of a situation where a) I was the only one who had the knowledge, b) There was no way to relearn the knowledge, and c) There was was a sustainable population.
Earlier ideas included:
-- a teacher who was taking his kids on a field trip to the vault when the bombs dropped (but even if the class had 30 people it would not be able to propagate the human race, and the average 5th grader would probably remember more than I did)
-- a colony ship with frozen embryos (I found it difficult to get the details to work in my head)
I had been kicking this idea around in my head for years, but things finally clicked into place. I was definitely inspired by the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the book
Wool.
The part about the 12th Grade English teacher is 100% true. From the very beginning when I had thought up the concept, I knew I wanted to talk about life being a series of losses of innocence.